Musical Forms

Musical Forms

In music, the musical form in its generic sense designates both a musical structure and a writing tradition that allows placing the musical work in the history of the evolution of musical creation.

I'm Chris Nolasce and today I'm going to talk about musical forms.

Structure and gender

The concept of form can not be learned directly. Only listening to the work, its development over time, allows perception. Historically, the composer who titled a work relating it to a precise form could refer indistinctly to its generic aspects (that is, to its destination), or its musical structure (that is, its architecture), or even both at the same time. time, generic aspects and structural aspects, since they are often imbricated. It is what has naturally produced a semantic slip, and many terms that designate different forms - motet, fugue, aria, rondo, etc. - they have been covered with different meanings, sometimes close to the concept of musical genre, other times close to the musical structure.

A notorious example is the term "sonata" which, according to the context, can designate the "sonata genre", or the "sonata form" present in different genres, for example, the classical-romantic sonata, the quartet or the symphony, which they use it in some of their movements, and for what are known as "sonata-symphonic genres".

Form and structure

The form is even distinguished from the musical structure, in the sense that the same form can in fact - depending on the work projected, according to the composer, according to the uses of the time, etc. - adopt this or that structure.

Thus, the «prelude», when it designates the introductory form of an opera: the prelude of Bizet's Carmen covers the «structure» of a rondo (ABACAD), while that of Wagner's The Gold of the Rhine weaves freely a «sonorous decoration »Adequate, without following a particular« structure ». In its original sense, the prelude designated only what preceded the most important part of a work -cf. the preludes and fugues of Bach.

• Los aspectos estructurales asociados a una forma, deben de ser considerados como constituyendo un simple esquema no constriñente. El no respeto de las reglas no excluye forzosamente una obra de la forma tomada como modelo.

Por ejemplo, la «sinfonía», forma característica de los periodos clásico y romántico, es tradicionalmente descrita como la sucesión de los cuatro movimientos siguientes: allegro, lento, menuet y rondó. Ahora bien, es muy fácil encontrar sinfonías en que el marco se aleja poco o mucho de este «plan ideal» ―por ejemplo, la Sinfonía n° 34 en do mayor K. 338 de Mozart no tiene más que tres movimientos, mientras que la Sinfonía Pastoral de Beethoven tiene cinco―: a pesar de estas excepciones estructurales, tales obras deben evidentemente ser consideradas como pertenecientes claramente a la forma «sinfonía».

• Desgraciadamente, es necesario señalar que el término de «forma» es a menudo empleado como sinónimo de «estructura», lo que entraña fatalmente algunas nuevas confusiones: por ejemplo, «forma binaria» por «estructura binaria».

Por ejemplo, si se dice que el segundo movimiento de tal sinfonía está escrito en «forma de lied», esto no significa de ningún modo que se trata de la «forma lied» ―que es una muestra a las claras de música vocal y no de música sinfónica―, sino más bien que «su arquitectura sigue la estructura musical habitualmente asociada a esta forma vocal», a saber: A B A'. Se aprecia que una expresión tal que «forma lied» puede, según el contexto, aludir a una verdadera forma, o bien a una simple estructura.

• Si el término forma es utilizada como un puro sinónimo de «estructura musical», alude de hecho a la definición misma de la estructura, organización de los elementos constitutivos de una obra: su arquitectura compositiva, su desarrollo, la disposición de las ideas musicales, sus imitaciones, sus reexposiciones, etc.

De hecho, la célebre teoría de las formas musicales, elaborada en el siglo XVIII por J. Mattheson, J.A. Scheibe, Joseph Riepel y Heinrich Christoph Koch, es de hecho una «teoría de las estructuras musicales».

Form and gender

The form is also distinguished from the musical genre. However, it is approached, with the condition of admitting that the concept of "gender" can be displayed in an arborescent manner.

For example, the genre "instrumental music" is divided into several branches: the chamber music genre, the concert music genre, the symphonic music genre, etc. This last genre is subdivided into several sub-branches: the symphony genre, the overture genre, the symphonic poem genre, the ballet genre, etc. It is these sub-branches - symphony, overture, symphonic poem, ballet, etc. - that are traditionally considered as forms.

It is observed that depending on the context, several terms that serve to designate different musical forms can also allude to the associated musical genre.

For example, if you say "Richard Wagner has composed thirteen operas", "Yesterday afternoon, Juan has heard an opera", "Don Giovanni is my favorite opera", the three mentions of the term "opera" allude to the musical form, is to say to the «unit» -a precise musical work, even not identified- that can be counted and distinguished within a group.

On the other hand, if you say "Johann Sebastian Bach has never written for opera", "John often listens to opera", "Opera singers are almost always divas", the three mentions of the word "opera" allude to this the musical genre, that is, a "multiplicity" of works of the same nature, constituting, therefore, uncountable elements.

On the other hand, you can not say "Yesterday afternoon, Juan heard a bel canto": the term "bel canto" here refers exclusively to a musical genre, and not a form. In the same way, it will never be said: «Juan often listens to a concert» -but rather «Juan often listens to concertante music» -: the term «concert» refers here exclusively to a musical form, and not a genre.

Schematically, "gender" designates the whole, while "form" designates an element of this set: "gender" corresponds to the branch of the tree, "form" corresponds to the fruit; or in other words, "the form is the terminal element of the genre". However, the difference between the two concepts is extremely tenuous.

Unit of time

The musical form is revealed to us at the time and as the development of the musical work happens: each moment is potentially a moment of the future, a projection into the unknown. This is the meaning of the very beautiful title of a work by Henri Dutilleux that proposes to immerse us in the mystery of the moment.

Unit of the work

Inscribed in time, the musical form can not, by its essence, be compared to the other artistic, pictorial, architectural or other forms. The musical formalization is in fact first and foremost a highlight. Form and structure are even difficult to distinguish. The structuring intervention of the hearing builds, on the one hand, an inner listening in the composer and, on the other, an active listening of the listener. This perception is circumscribed to the duration, which allows a formal unity to the musical work. Unity is the first condition, but it is elaborated only because there are redundancies, oppositions, comparisons, conflicts ... The prior structuring of the material by the composer precedes the stage of formalization in time. It is a methodological step of creation since it proceeds both from spirit and from poetry. The musical form will then reveal in its development a structuring of the aesthetic perception, which can be carried out from theoretical models (sonata form, etc.) or from the material itself, imposing itself on the immediate intuitions of the composer.

Gestalt

According to Boris de Schlœzer, a theorist inspired by the Gestaltpsychologie, only this formal cohesion of the work, the globalizing totality of its organization, provides it with an intrinsic and immanent sense, in which music means itself and seeks a certain communicative feeling for those who listen to it In reality, music is part of a "lived" time that gives meaning to the musical work. If the content of the music is ineffable, immanent, its inscription in the temporal frame of our present gives it a structure and a form.

Making his critical Gestalt conception prevail, Schlœzer comes to distinguish structure and form in the following way: the structure resides in the disposition of the parts conceived in order to constitute a whole, a unit. The form is this as such, that is, the way in which the work reaches unity. By essence and by necessity, the musical work would thus be almost perpetually remanded entirely to its parts and from the parts to the whole. But only the formal unity, the harmonious cohesion of the constituent elements operates this surplus of expression that manifests the very essence of the work, its uniqueness. This approach allows placing musical creation in the psychology of perception, emphasizing the importance of this reciprocal influence of the whole on the parts.

Procedure and processes

The musical creation adopts theoretical (generic) strategies, which have evolved in the history of music, strategies designed to promote change, movement, from collective bases. These rules, these systems, can approach a law of organization - as the English term "procedure" is understood - or procedural semantics, that is, not so much that which concerns the procedure itself, the strategy of change, but rather to the phases of that change, actually the process. This notion of process has directly supplanted other notions of structuring music, such as those that created musical objects, architectural elements of a structure to be defined. From an object / structure duality, in the sixties it was passed to a material / process duality.

How has one gone from the procedural vision - in which the form is pre-established, confined by the theory - to a vision that represents a process? It has gone through a game of experiences about sound and life, and an analysis of the relationships with the parties. The observation of traditional material and new representations proves that music is always placed in a structured movement that fixes the degree of stability of such or such a moment, and separates it from its anchoring points with the whole of the work.

Contemporary music and musical forms

In contemporary music, the composer faces a sound material rich in its own expressiveness, its power of immanence, it is only led to coordinate the need for a formalization of processes and the obligation of relationships that unlock the laws of perception of the informal strata of the musical. The function-form relationship does not really matter at the level of a creation that incessantly takes the risk of the new. Only the relationship between the material - acoustic model, musical transposition - and the induced function - by nature or by destination - provides the criteria for a possible formal integration. Creating new organizations of musical functions that will be directed less directly to the hierarchical organization of the developed form than to the interest of the listener that attracts its reception, has become a new notion translated by the idea of ​​musical material. All these concepts that direct this search for a history of reception have been transformed in a short time into basic modern concepts to participate in the evolution of forms.

This integration of a new material has given rise to a new search dynamic, based at the same time on the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of the material, and on the conditions of the perception of the musical. That is to say, this has reduced the formal characteristics of the material and even the maneuvering margins of the representation have increased. At the same time new in its vision and in the possibility of its organization, this material interrogates the artistic consciousness of the composers (everything that expresses the theory and that the practice seeks to realize). Musical poetics seeks to match the truths of representation with the depths of the imaginary. It can not accommodate the psychosensory limits, but is led to invite the diversity of relationships maintained within the sound, the construction of new perceptive functions, and musical.

Functionality

The formal balance is maintained thanks to a functional balance anticipated by the composer. The analysis of macroscopic and microscopic perceptual functions -perception of variations and repetitions, beams of remanent indexes, control of dissonance ...- and memory -motivated by the joints that act as memories- allows to intervene in a relevant way in the perception of the global structure. The microstructure and macrostructure have the same level of ductility that the musical composition has been able to exploit. The new phenomenon, and essential in the contemporary aesthetic intuition, is that this connection can be found in the immanent nature of each sound, at the same time as in the general structure of the work. This allows us to take into account this totality of reencounters or of oppositions of the phenomena -harmonicity or inharmony, texture, balance ...-. This ambivalence of the musical material imposes two logics: a local and a global one. While this dualistic prerogative may be the object of organization, we try to preserve the unconscious figures of intuition, to which all musical formalisms refer. These formalisms, tributaries of certain material aspects of music, are based on the acoustic laws and constituent elements of sound, such as durations, heights, intensities or timbres that become formal attributes. The relationships between these parameters require a particular and deep attention to the [attributes of the perception of the form.